Garlands and cake for Bartje today. The image of the Drenthe icon celebrates its 69th birthday today. And in all those years of life it has had to endure a lot of hardships.
‘I do not pray for brown beans’, who does not know that text? The writer of the book Bart, Anne de Vries received a statue of the Drenthe mascot in 1954 on his fiftieth birthday. The garden of the old town hall on the Noordersingel became the home of the statue. “That way everyone could see Bartje,” says Ellen Velds, of the Drents Archive.
But many trials awaited him there. “You can see: he didn’t come out of the fight well.” Cracks can be seen at the neck and at the clogs. “He was decapitated once and pulled from the pedestal once.” He was also once found badly damaged in Bovensmilde and the statue was once stolen by a New Year’s Eve association. All those wild adventures meant that a new place for the statue had to be found. “He was not resistant to all that vandalism,” says Velds.
The statue was then brought in from the garden of the town hall. “But when will you get there? If you need to renew your passport once, or if you need a new driver’s license. Otherwise you won’t see it.”